All About You FRIDAY – Lessons from Charlie Brown

I know the holidays are over, but allow me to wax nostalgic one more time before heading into the business of the new year.

In June of 1996, we got the keys to this house. It was the original 1950’s bungalow complete with pink and black tiled backsplash in the tiny kitchen and a space that barely fit a kitchen table. We knew the second we bought it that demo day was in order.

My husband assured me he could have a custom kitchen built in a month. He was a master carpenter, after all. So with great confidence, I wielded a sledge hammer and started tearing down cabinets and knocking down walls. Six months later, we still didn’t have a kitchen. That’s what happens when you try to renovate a home while you are both working full-time and trying to raise a family. We moved from a one bedroom apartment into a house where the majority of our existence happened in the living room, complete with a refrigerator and microwave right next to the TV. For the boys (my husband, my teenage brother-in-law and my toddler son), it was the perfect arrangement. For me, not so much. It would be a year and a half before I cooked a meal in my kitchen.

In a desperate move to bring some Christmas spirit into the home that year, I found a tiny artificial tree with its trunk wrapped in burlap and plopped it in the only available corner of the living room. It’s my Charlie Brown tree, I thought. Nobody was excited about it and in fact, just assumed we wouldn’t have a tree. But I needed it to be there. I saved that tree for many years, placing it on a high shelf in the vaulted ceiling of our new kitchen, a reminder of the sacrifices that were made in making this beautiful home.

Cut to many years later, I found myself being constantly reminded of my Charlie Brown tree because when I went out on a date (and I went out on over 100 first dates at one point after I was widowed), every time a guy found out I played the piano, he would ask, “Can you play that Charlie Brown song?” I couldn’t. So I bought the sheet music. It was hard. I practiced it and learned about half of it before I decided there would be easier ways to impress a guy. Like I could fix his tendonitis instead. Learning jazz piano is an investment.

The Charlie Brown Christmas special was an impending failure. That’s what the CBS executives thought after they screened Charles Shulz’s creation. It had turned out totally different than they imagined but, sponsored by Coca Cola and heavily marketed with only weeks before it was to air, they had to run with it. I think maybe several of them started looking for new jobs, because Shulz broke all the rules in the making of what would become a Christmas classic.

He refused to use a laugh track. Back in 1965, this was unheard of, but Shulz didn’t want a machine dictating to the audience what was supposed to be funny. He only wanted you to laugh if it moved you.

The characters were voiced by real kids, not actors who had been trained to recite a line on cue. He didn’t want the kids to sound like grown men talking in high-pitched voices, which was the custom of the day. Instead, he employed regular kids, some of who couldn’t even read yet, and had them recite the lines all in one day. Imagine herding those cats.

He also insisted on getting religious. The scene where Linus recites the Christmas story by quoting Luke 2 in the Bible is one the execs wished they could have cut. But to Shulz, the true meaning of the holiday needed to be at the core of his production.

To top off this very not child-like kids production, music producer Lee Mendelson hired Vince Guaraldi to write the score after hearing his music while riding in a taxi cab. Actually, Guaraldi was hired to score a documentary on Charles Shulz that never made it to the screen. Instead, they ended up with a bunch of music that ended up being the background for Charlie Brown Christmas, adding to the subdued tone of what was supposed to be an upbeat kid’s show.

On December 9, 1965, Charlie Brown Christmas aired on CBS and 15.5 million American households tuned in. It was a hit. And decades later, this authentic, slightly melancholy animation about Christmas is the #3 most watched Christmas show in the world (behind Home Alone and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer).

Turns out, kids of all ages love something that is real and not hyped up. It’s okay to be melancholy around the holidays because sometimes people just aren’t feeling it. Christmas isn’t really about how nice your tree is. And when you hear a song that makes you want to celebrate, you should get up and dance. Check out the dance moves of those cartoon kids in one of the final scenes of the show. They aren’t pretty. You don’t have to know how to dance to dance. And jazz piano is pretty cool. I just might learn that song this year.

Lessons from Charlie Brown. Welcome to the new year.

It’s been a long week. Don’t forget to celebrate.

Until next time…